Veronica Mars Kickstarter

I never watched the teen noir detective drama Veronica Mars when it was on the air. When it went off, friends kept discovering it and warning me about the inevitable heartbreak from knowing there would be no fourth season of the show.

When it showed up on Netflix streaming, I binged on two and a half seasons of it while working out at the gym. It was a fun show with lots of twists and turns, many of them dark, a few unexpected. Then it suddenly got pulled from the Netflix lineup, and I fell off the Mars wagon. A big part of that was knowing that yes, Season 3 was going to end, and yes, I was going to miss the quirky show.

It looks like I’m going to have to get caught up, because Veronica Mars just might be returning. A movie based on the series (and even a follow-up series with Mars as an FBI agent) has been kicked around for years, but it never went anywhere because writer/producer Rob Thomas could never get enough studio support.

So Thomas and lead actor Kristen Bell went to Kickstarter and made their final pitch to fandom: give me $2 million and I’ll give you a Veronica Mars movie. On the first day of the kickstarter, it raised $1.2 million from 18,469 backers (and that’s just the number at 4:26 p.m.; the number keeps jumping higher even as I write this).

It’s a fascinating phenomenon to watch, and it makes you wonder what other TV series’ might be resurrected this way. Stargate?Babylon 5? And dare I say it … Firefly?

That last one seems increasingly unlikely given Joss Whedon’s commitments to Marvel and their Phase II movies, but it does get you thinking. Stargate and B5 both had (and have) significant followings — given the right pitch, maybe a Kickstarter could resurrect one of these venerable shows.

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Nuketown is a speculative fiction website that's been published continuously since 1996.

It's publishing focus is articles, reviews and editorials about science fiction, fantasy, and horror with heroic or libertarian overtones. It covers a variety of topics within the speculative fiction genre, including games, movies, soundtracks, books, and websites.